One Crisis Away

KERA’s One Crisis Away project focuses a spotlight on North Texans living on the financial edge both in weekly stories and regular in-depth series.

A scene from West Dallas near Singleton Boulevard.

Credit Allison V. Smith for KERA News

A job loss, health emergency, even legal trouble can be enough to plunge a third of our friends and neighbors into financial distress. One Crisis Away puts a human face on asset poverty and the financial struggles of people in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Explore multimedia projects: No Place To Go, a deep dive into affordable housing and gentrification in West Dallas; Rebuilding A Life, a series about North Texans recovering from devastating tornadoes; Drowning In Debt, stories about and resources for living with financial burden; and more.

The statistics are startling: If you’re a black man in America, you’re five times as likely to go to state prison as a white man. Latinos and African Americans make up one-third of the U.S. population; they make up two-thirds of the prison population.

You can’t talk about incarceration without talking about race. Christopher Scott knows that too well.

More than one in five Dallas children lives in poverty, while one in four Dallas families have a parent who was born in another country, a new study details. That's just two of the statistics detailed in the new "State of Texas Children" report from the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

A lot of people see prison as the last resort — the ultimate thing to avoid. Then there's Chainnaron Soeurn. After he was released, the struggle to pay the costs of probation was so tough that he chose to go back behind bars.

Calculating the exact cost of time behind bars is almost impossible. The meter starts running at the moment of arrest, and doesn’t stop after someone’s released. From lawyer fees to jail calls to probation, going away is expensive. Just ask 37-year-old Stanley Walington, a father of five.

Numerous laws protect people from discrimination when they're searching for a home. But many areas across North Texas and around the country still struggle with patterns of housing inequities and segregation.

Austin is known as a city of renters — more than half of residents lease a place to live. And each day, a dozen Travis County families are evicted. Audrey McGlinchy of KUT decided to explore what happens when someone can no longer pay the rent, and got to know several people facing eviction.

As the Dallas economy has boomed over the last decade, something else has surged, too — the wealth gap between whites and people of color.

A report released this month by nonprofit Prosperity Now attributes the disparity, in part, to the city’s “extensive history of segregation and its longer lasting effects.” And exacerbating these disparities are home values and housing costs in Dallas.

What would happen if all Americans were guaranteed a monthly income — whether or not they were employed?

Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and author of the book "Give People Money." She spoke with Krys Boyd on a recent episode of KERA's Think about how universal basic income — UBI for short — might change this country.

A few years back, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha felt perfectly comfortable telling parents it was fine for their kids to drink the town’s water. Flint, Michigan was a part of America, wasn’t it?

After she learned it was contaminated with lead, she evolved from passive pediatrician to investigator of the city’s water supply and activist for the public’s health. And the repercussions are still playing out.

As the middle class changes, sometimes even households with six figure incomes are struggling. The typical American worker puts in 47 hours a week, and nearly 5 percent work more than one job, with hours that vary depending on the needs of big corporations.

On paper, Natalie Berquist has a good, steady grip on her life. She's had the same job for five years and earns $17 an hour, with benefits. Despite making more than double the minimum wage, she was struggling when we met her five years ago. And now, she’s still juggling work, money and a more complicated version of motherhood.

Life hasn't changed much since we visited Jubilee Park three years ago. It's a neighborhood on the financial edge, in the shadow of Interstate 30 in Old East Dallas. Chris Crowley was born and raised there. He's got a better job now, but he's spending 24 hours a week commuting.

With a low unemployment rate and hot housing market, North Texas boasts of having one of the country’s strongest economies. But new research on Dallas County from the Communities Foundation of Texas and the Center for Public Policy Priorities paints a different picture.

About every five years, Congress reconsiders the farm bill. The package deals with most affairs regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The bill also funds the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — what used to be called “food stamps.”

Millions of Texans depend on SNAP to help buy food every month, and recent attempts by the U.S. House to change the program didn't work because the bill lacked votes. The Senate, however, is expected to release its own version of a farm bill this June.

Dallas’ first comprehensive housing policy, approved last week, is designed to encourage more affordable housing and disrupt patterns of segregation and gentrification. However, the policy has its critics.

Since the recession of 2008, and the housing market crash, fewer Americans are able to purchase a home. And a new report from The Pew Charitable Trusts finds that since then, many families have become "rent burdened" and struggle to pay the bills.

New research shows that even basic digital skills bump earning potential by about 17 percent. And since the auto industry is moving in a digital direction, there are a lot of good-paying jobs to be found there. A few hundred Dallas high schoolers just got to see for themselves.